ByPeter Rainer, Film criticDecember 21, 2012

Every year at this time, despite all the dross and dregs, the franchise-flick folderol, and the misfires, I still feel upbeat about the movies. There was a lot to like in 2012, even though most of what I admired issued from precincts far removed from Hollywood.

Before getting down to the 10 Best honor roll, a few preliminary cogitations, kudos, and cavils.

The raging digital versus film controversy continues unabated. Does digital technology, which is inexorably superseding film, signal the death knell of cinematographic artistry? I love the texture and grain of film much more than I do the comparatively flat look of digital. Still, I recognize a losing battle when I see one, so I’m trying to think positively about this.

Digital technology, because it is so much less expensive and more versatile than film technology, is empowering people who might never before have had the means to make a movie. This democratization of the medium will no doubt result in bales of bad movies, but some great talents will likely emerge, too, and from pockets previously unheard from around the world.

The year’s most controversial movie is Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty.” I find myself among the lonely dissenters on this one. Certainly this film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden is smashingly directed, but its torture scenes, and their consequences, are calculatedly deficient in any political context. It’s a timorous movie posing as a courageous one. At least “Argo,” flimsy but enjoyable, didn’t pretend to be some kind of new-style political docudrama.

Some of our biggest directors brought out long-simmering projects, with mixed results. Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” had a mysteriously beautiful performance from Daniel Day-Lewis and a few hushed, allusive sequences that captured Lincoln’s grandeur without solemnizing him. But too much of the film felt like a streamlined history lesson in the golden age of Hollywood mold. Quentin Tarantino’s pre-Civil War slave epic “Django Unchained” (opening Christmas) is his latest tasteless (sometimes hilariously so) pop mélange of blood and guts and revisionism. It’s his “Mandingo” redo.

Literary and theatrical adaptations were up and down. “Les Misérables” (also opening Christmas) was a great big fat enjoyable entertainment, with Anne Hathaway sporting what I sincerely hope will not become the new fashion look – shorn hair and hollowed cheeks.

I’m also glad to see some attention being paid by Hollywood to characters over the age of 27. Quaint as they are, movies like “Hope Springs,” “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” and “Quartet” (a limited run starts Dec. 28) at least acknowledge the fact that people who haven’t the slightest idea how to work an iPhone are still worth making a movie about. The most acclaimed movie about aging this year came from France, Michael Haneke’s “Amour,” which I found more morbid than moving.

But enough back talk. Here’s my 10 Best list, plus some additional worthies:

1. The Master – Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie, loosely suggested by the early career of L. Ron Hubbard, was not an audience favorite, but it’s the most adventurous and disturbing and emotionally complex movie I saw all year, with a performance by Joaquin Phoenix that is almost prehensile in its power to hold the screen.

2. This Is Not a Film – The great Iranian director Jafar Panahi, under house arrest and forbidden by the authorities to make movies, crafted, with the help of Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, this clandestine video essay that heartbreakingly expresses both his loss and his indomitability.

3. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia – A Turkish police procedural about the search for a buried body in desolate Anatolia slowly, inevitably, becomes a meditation on the nature of love and loss and violence and truth. Writer-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan maintains a rapt, unwavering gaze.

5. Photographic Memory – Ross McElwee has been documenting his life for decades and never more touchingly than in this film, in which he seeks out his errant son and attempts to reach back into his own past as a way to connect with his future.

6. The Secret World of Arrietty – This is a lyrical hand-drawn animated marvel, based on “The Borrowers” books, from Japan’s Studio Ghibli by way of Disney. Hiromasa Yonebayashi made his feature-film debut from a script co-written by his mentor Hayao Miyazaki, whose deft genius is felt throughout.

8. The Gatekeepers – Six former leaders of Israel’s Shin Bet security force open up to director Dror Moreh and lay out in uncompromising, excruciating detail their country’s post-1967 history. Nothing else like it has come out of the Middle East.